When you want to "bring something to life" in your writing, or get
concretely detailed (to show something with description rather than just
generally tell about that something), you usually have to be a good
observer of sensory detail which has a lot to do with adjectives
(modifies/enhances nouns) and adverbs (modifies/enhances verbs), though one must
always beware of clichés:

sight--his brown hair hangs down to the middle of his sloping back

sound--the train he sits on clanks metallically beneath him

taste--his hair tastes like bad chemicals, sour and tinny

touch--his skin must feel like sandpaper

smell--there is something musty and moldy about him

psychic/intuition (ha ha)--he seems sad like a dog laying on a dusty
sidewalk in Mexico--I sense his pain in the tired squint of his eyes

Figurative Language--more maximalist--also known as imagery or metaphorical language,
is often the only way to really make something plain or something abstract feel
more concrete via comparison (you compare the literal thing or idea to a
figurative concrete thing). Notice that some of my examples above are
figurative, though one must always beware of bad
metaphors:

simile--has like or as in the sentence--his hair hangs like broken
violin strings

metaphor--doesn't have like or as in the sentence--often more surreal
feeling--may take the form of an adjective or adverb--his broken violin
string hair--his sandpaper skin--

personification--(often easy to cliché)--giving inanimate objects
human qualities (Barry Lopez often does this, say, to describe "The
Wind" in Desert Notes)--his hair moved like fingers around his
shoulders--Plath's Metaphors poem--"[I'm] a mellon strolling on two
tendrils" (mellons aren't human, but strolling is a very human descriptor)

analogy--comparison of things to make a point--often more involved, or
more narrative (false analogy is a logical fallacy where the two things compared
are way too different, and thus can't be accurately compared; but this can
create surprise and humor in more opened-form creative writing; often the
comparison is of different things)--watching people while riding on the bus is a
lot like traveling to another country: things look familiar from afar, but up
close you wonder if you've entered another dimension (sorry, I'm not good with
analogies...comics use this form a lot)